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After months of sniping at one another over politics, Mainers finally have something to agree on: rooting for the Red Sox.

This week’s playoff showdown between the New York Yankees and “the home team” of most Mainers, as former Gov. Joseph Brennan wrote in an official proclamation in 1979, offers a rare chance to put aside our differences and focus on what’s most important in the next few days: beating the Yankees.

No doubt the politicians will keep on yammering, but most sports fans in Maine will tune them out to watch as the two teams take the field in the Bronx for a three-game showdown series.

Having been raised properly, like most Mainers, I find cheering for the Red Sox comes easily despite growing up mostly in Ohio and Virginia.

Maine’s ties to the Boston ballclub reach back to the legendary Red Sox teams of the early 1900s, when Lewistown’s own Bill Carrigan played and managed.

In the 1950s, economic development officials looking for a chance to tout Maine introduced “Maine Day” celebrations during doubleheaders at Fenway Park, a tradition kept up by the team every now and then — most recently in 2022.

My favorite detail of the old Maine Day festivities was something that seemed as absurd to vulnerable ballplayers then as it will to everyone nowadays: organizers gave one of the batters a bear cub as a gift. Really, a living, breathing cub.

In 1955, someone came up with the oddball idea. “Homer, a husky yearling bear who makes his home at the Maine game farm in Gray, will be given to the first Red Sox player to hit a home run during State of Maine Day at Fenway Park,” the Biddeford Journal announced.

The Bath Independent had this to say, “Just what the winner will do with Homer was not suggested, although officials were emphatic in their belief that he could be very successful in keeping the bill collectors away from the door.”

Earle Ducette, a sportswriter for the Press Herald, wrote in 1958 that Homer the Fourth — the cub handout had by then been taking place annually since ’55 — would likely wind up in a big city zoo. 

Not every player knew about the zoo option. In 1959, Red Sox Hall of Famer Billy Goodman, whose home run during Maine Day won him the latest of the Homers, turned to his manager afterward and asked, “What the hell we gonna do with that bear?”

In 1961, Homer VI, the last of the prize bears, was reportedly so unruly that officials decided to stop the practice.

The state and team kept up Maine Day through the many long years that followed, however,  with festivities extending to lobster feasts for sportswriters covering the Red Sox or, in 1961, the 60-pound red snapper hot dog on a 10-pound roll made in Maine and carved up for hungry fans.

Over the past couple of busier decades at the ballpark, when filling Fenway has rarely proved a problem, Maine Day has faded into an irregular event, last held in 2022.

Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Hannah Pingree recently told me that she’d love to see a return of the annual celebration at Fenway Park. When I inquired about a possible bear cub prize, she said she’d need to run it by the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife.